Oracle – for when it was like that when you got there

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It was my turn to “cook” tonight. Deb was quite emphatic on that point. Continuing the fine and long-held tradition, sustained through generations of British manhood, I duly trudged down to the chippy.
Fish and chips, with that unique and exquisite smell of malt vinegar. Never mind all those fancy aftershaves, for us Brits it’s Sarsons…pour homme.
Except that, when I get to the shop, I find that I have no cash on me and they don’t accept cards.
No, not even “Chip and Pin”.
Eventually, the hunter gatherer returns ( having made a short detour to an ATM) to be greeted by the now ravenous family. Honestly, this cooking lark is all go.

It could be worse I suppose. I mean, the recipe for Victoria Sponge doesn’t suddenly stop working for no readily apparent reason, unlike, to take a random example, installing Oracle XE on Mint and Ubuntu.

When I wrote the original post, all was working perfectly. Mint 11, Oracle XE 11g, job done.
However, Mint 13 ( or Maya, if you prefer) is a bit of a different story. So, for that matter is Ubuntu 11.10 and above.

At this point, I’d like to say a big thanks to Gil Standen, whose comment on the original post was spot on in pin-pointing and solving this issue.

So, if you’ve found your way here having been frustrated in your installation attempts by this pesky error, what follows is an explanation of the issue, together with the steps that I used to resolve it on Mint 13.

The problem

As you are probably aware, Mint is based on Ubuntu. No doubt you are also aware that from 11.10, Ubuntu changed the way systemd worked.
You didn’t know that ? No, I must confess that it passed me by as well.
Anyway, the upshot of this is that, without getting too technical, they’ve moved stuff around again.
Oracle can’t find what it’s looking for so the toys come out of the pram in a shower of ORA-01034 and ORA-00845.

If you want to be a bit more technical ( and confirm that this is indeed the error you’re hitting), you simply need to open a terminal …

The problem is a bit tricky to spot, because there is something missing. In earlier Ubuntu based Linux versions you would have a shared memory area mounted on /dev/shm. This is what oracle-xe is looking for.

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When I contributed to this thread long time ago, about this /etc/init.d/oracle-shm file, the Linux Containers revolution was just a whisper. Check out how far it has come. There are many guides already on the net for putting Oracle XE down on Ubuntu using Linux Containers, but thanks to “filemon” ( https://hub.docker.com/u/filemon/ ) it’s now just pushbutton install if you need an Oracle EE 11gR2 on Ubuntu PDQ!

Hi, I try to do all of this step by step. But when I try to do update-rc.d oracle-shm defaults 01 99? I have error: insserv: warning: script is corrupt or invalid: /etc/init.d/../rc2.d/s01shm_load. Please, help me, How can I solve it?

I didn’t encounter this particular issue. First of all, I assume that you’re trying to install Oracle Express Edition 11g on a Debian based distro (e.g. Mint, Ubuntu, Debian etc).
If you are trying to do this on a Red-Hat based distro (e.g. Fedora, Red Hat, CentOS), then I suggest you take a look here as the process is quite different.

If you’re hitting this problem on a Debian-based distro then a couple of things that spring to mind are :

You need to be connected as root ( or sudo) for all of the steps that follow.

It’s probably worth checking the oracle-shm file to make sure that the changes you’ve made are actually saved there and that there aren’t any typos. It’s a small file so

cat /etc/init.d/oracle-shm

… should do the job.

The actual commands you need to run after editing the file (still connected as root or sudo, remember) are :